Translated from the Japanese by Jocelyne Allen Inio Asano is a mangaka best known for being one of the manga world’s smartest and boldest creators. His series Goodnight Punpun is an oft-touted masterpiece that taps into the tragedy of growing up lost and frightened. It’s a series that represents the literary highs which manga can …
Japanese Literature
Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori In 2018, the English translation of Convenience Store Woman, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, was published by Granta. The book had such an intense and profound effect on me, as a reader, that it remains somewhere in my top 5 novels of all time. I wrote an …
The Attack on Titan anime series (also known as Shingeki no Kyojin) was a colossal hit on its initial release. This was the anime series that revitalised the genre in the West and even had people who knew nothing about anime hyped to talk about it. Attack on Titan did for anime what Game of …
Translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s original Before the Coffee Gets Cold, an adaptation of his own stage play, was one of the best-selling novels of 2019. A sweet, goofy, novel with heart to spare. We called it “unapologetically awkward and campy, but it is full of soul, presented through clever world …
The anime adaptation of The Promised Neverland manga released its first season in 2019 to critical praise. The show finally offered answers to anime fans wondering why manga readers were so obsessed with the series. But, for fans won over by the anime, is The Promised Neverland manga worth reading? Yes. Here’s why. What is …
The publishing world, wherever in the world you are, is still dominated by men: male writers, editors, and publishers. This is despite the fact that the majority of readers around the world are women, and that so much of the best writing has always come from women authors. Today, the best Japanese novels are all …
Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett & David Boyd Mieko Kawakami is already a superstar author in her native Japan. A philosophical and feminist powerhouse of beautiful prose, interwoven with discussions on death, birth, womanhood, growth, and change. She is now a rising star in the English language, too, thanks to translations of works …
Hiromi Kawakami has made a name for herself as a writer with a defined sense of time and place, and how these forces change us. In Strange Weather in Tokyo, her lovers represent two periods of Japan’s history and how they must court one another in the present. In The Ten Loves of Nishino, ten …
In the afterword of The Beast Warrior, Nahoko Uehashi writes that the book’s prequel, The Beast Player, “was like a beautiful closed circle”, that it didn’t require a sequel. After reading both books, one immediately after the other, it’s impossible to agree with that statement. The Beast Warrior not only feels like a true successor …
Soji Shimada is a legend of genre fiction in Japan, standing at the top of an impressive mountain of great whodunnit writers. But here, the author of Murder in the Crooked House and The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has turned his ambitions to science fiction, while still maintaining that knack for suspense, tension, and mystery. One …